Either way, Carl A. Williams found his 35-year career with the New Jersey State Police -- the last five as its leader -- swiftly ended in 1999 after a newspaper quoted him as saying that cocaine and marijuana traffickers were most likely to be members of minority groups.

Gov. Christie Whitman ousted him as state police superintendent as a coalition of black legislators, ministers and civil rights advocates called his statement racist and demanded his removal.

The article, in The Star-Ledger of Newark, came amid intense controversy over accusations that state troopers looking to make drug arrests regularly engaged in racial profiling by singling out minority drivers for stops and searches on the state's highways.

Even before his published remarks, which the governor called inconsistent with efforts to improve the troopers' image, Mr. Williams had been accused by critics of refusing to acknowledge what they called a long history of racial profiling by the troopers. His supporters noted that it was not until a month after she fired him that Governor Whitman conceded that some troopers engaged in such profiling.

Last week, Mr. Williams, 61, was pithy in his view of his dismissal. ''I was sacrificed,'' he said. ''I just quoted reality'' in the 1999 article.

He recalled that he had also said in the article that his linking of various groups to certain kinds of drug trafficking was based on government statistics, that predominantly white motorcycle gangs appeared to control the methamphetamine market, and that racial profiling stops were wrong and that he would not condone them.

Still bitter over his dismissal? ''It wasn't one of the nicest things that happened to me in my life,'' he said.

Mr. Williams said he spends his time volunteering, traveling and exercising. ''Being in good shape,'' he said, ''helps keep my sanity.''

Old MacDonald Never Had Rezoning

The legal and oratorical ground has been fertilized for the next round in the great Hamptons farm fuss.

In 1997, Gines Serran-Pagan, a Spanish-born painter, bought a one-acre site in Southampton Village on Long Island with a house and several barns from the long-past days when the property was a farm. He moved into the house and populated the barns with roosters, rabbits, even a llama -- to delight and educate his young son and local children, he said.

But the animal noises, smells and incursions onto nearby property did not delight various neighbors, setting off angry braying and indignant quacking, in and out of court. Included were charges and denials of a conflict of interest on the part of Mayor Joseph P. Romanosky Jr., whose in-laws were among the objecting neighbors.

In September, after a judge said the zoning law did not bar the animals, the village board rewrote the law to specify that farm animals were banned on less than 1 1/2 acres. The half-acre-short Mr. Serran-Pagan was forced to find homes for the 15 goats and 25 chickens and ducks he then had.

But last week, he was talking of a comeback. A neighbor who did not object to the animals had recently leased to him a half-acre that abuts his property for $10 a year, Mr. Serran-Pagan said, entitling him to a permit to return the animals.